Last week I attended the “Content Marketing Crash Course put on by Content Boost in New York University’s Kimmel Center. The Content Marketing Crash Course was designed to help marketing professionals learn how to create a structured content marketing plan for their business, and some strategies and tips to take their efforts to the next level. Here are my top four takeaways from the very insightful seminar:

1) Get Organized And Understand Your Goals Before You Create Your Content Marketing Plan
Before you sit down to put together your strategic plan, you have to know the answer to the question “what’s the purpose for your content marketing, and what will it do to your brand?” To do this, you need to first create a dream wish-list of what you would like to see for your brand. Next, you need to address how you want to go about enhancing your brand’s content marketing efforts and what your budget is. When creating a content marketing plan, or any marketing plan, a budget is essential. Without a proper budget of what your plan will cost, your ideas will never come to fruition. If you have identified all of this, then you are already well on your way to understanding what your campaign strategy is.

2) The Content Marketing Trifecta
According to Salvatore Trifilio, the Content Producer at Content Boost, The Content Marketing Trifecta is made up of blogging, social media and email. When posting on any one of these platforms, it is very important to leverage contact back-and-forth from blogging to social media to email and back. This increases your reach and saves you time by not having to constantly recreate the same material in different forms.

3) Co-Sourcing: Worth It Or Not?
Will you tackle content marketing in-house, out-of-house or in a co-sourcing model? A strong point in this conference was co-sourcing and whether or not you should do it. When co-sourcing, you won’t lose your “rock stars,” in fact it actually will help you give them space to breath. The last thing you want to do is wear out your best content marketers “rock stars,” and you’ll get a partner that you can trust at a fraction of the price. At the end of the day, you can’t fake content marketing and co-sourcing seemed to be a great option according to those in attendance.

4) Final Takeaways
Admittedly this is more than just one insight, but there were a lot of quick insights that I thought were really interesting, so here they are:

  • Gated assets must provide value to the end user. It takes time for a person to fill out your form or sign up for a free trial in order to access certain content.
  • Repurpose content. This makes the content marketer’s life significantly easier when thinking about new ideas, since they see what has already been done and what has worked.
  • Generate great titles.The title of an article, blog post, landing page, etc. is the first thing that a viewer sees before opening the entire content. A title can often make or break the success of your entire content.

And there you go, now it is almost as if you attended the Crash Course with me! Comment below and let us know what your top content marketing strategies, tips or insights are.